Multi-Centroid Task Descriptor for Dynamic Class Incremental Inference

Incremental learning could be roughly divided into two categories, i.e., class- and task-incremental learning. The main difference is whether the task ID is given during evaluation. In this paper, we show this task information is indeed a strong prior knowledge, which will bring significant improvement over class-incremental learning baseline, e.g., DER. Based on this observation, we propose a gate network to predict the task ID for class incremental inference. This is challenging as there is no explicit semantic relationship between categories in the concept of task. Therefore, we propose a multi-centroid task descriptor by assuming the data within a task can form multiple clusters. The cluster centers are optimized by pulling relevant sample-centroid pairs while pushing others away, which ensures that there is at least one centroid close to a given sample. To select relevant pairs, we use class prototypes as proxies and solve a bipartite matching problem, making the task descriptor representative yet not degenerate to uni-modal. As a result, our dynamic inference network is trained independently of baseline and provides a flexible, efficient solution to distinguish between tasks. Extensive experiments show our approach achieves state-of-the-art results, e.g., we achieve 72.41% average accuracy on CIFAR100-B0S50, outperforming DER by 3.40%.